Asus Eee Range Exposed

If you'll excuse me while I just put on my tape player: Asus' Eee PC has done rather well recently, garnering much love from us reviewers and if sales figures are anything to go by the general populace. Thus, it makes sense that Asus would wish to capitalise upon this success and chuck low-power low-priced components into a multitude of different products - thus the forthcoming E-range of products from Asus.
The products in question are the E-DT, E-TV and E-Monitor, a desktop system, TV with built-in PC and iMac style all-in-one monitor/PC respectively. Starting with the desktop we see a scheduled April or May release (and is to be demoed at CeBIT). The system will use an Intel Diamondville CPU, and run on the 945GC chipset according to DigiTimes. The closest comparison I can think of is probably Apple's Mac mini, which also packs some fairly low-end components into a small box; not that it's any less awesome for all that - saved by the OS perhaps.

Moving on to the E-Monitor the Apple comparisons inevitably surface again. The device will offer both 19in and 21in monitor sized and will use the same Linux OS as the sub-notebook version of the Eee. Unlike similar systems such as the iMac or Dell XPS One, though, the Eee-Monitor won't have pricing in the thousands, but rather is expected to come in at around $500 (£250-odd) - a considerable saving.

Lastly the system about which the least detail has been uncovered is the E-TV. This is known to be a 42in model that will also pack the same Linux operating system as featured on the Eee PC. The downside is that Asus doesn't sell TVs outside Asia currently, so no matter how good it is we'll likely never see it.

In relation to the Eee PC itself, Asus also announced that pending some market research, it has decided isn't going to be financially viable to produce a touchscreen-fitted Eee so it won't be. As cool a feature as it might be, I do agree that a touch screen would be a bit of a gimmick on a system like the Eee so lets just hope we see some more stock soon.